‘Thunderbolts*’ Review: Marvel’s Most Personal Therapy Session Doubles as Its Strongest in Years

“There is something wrong with me.” That’s the first thing we hear in “Thunderbolts*”—Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh) saying it flatly, just before she jumps off a rooftop. It’s not a dramatic suicide attempt. It’s work. She’s stealing classified samples from a lab and blowing the building up on her way out. But the emptiness in her voice is unmistakable. “Or maybe I’m just bored,” she adds, as if boredom were easier to confess than despair.

That opening scene signals what this film really is. For once, director Jake Schreier and writers Eric Pearson and Joanna Calo eschew the stakes of the multiversal and galactic kind. This time, the stakes are personal. They’re intimate. “Thunderbolts*” is about what happens after the action movies end and the survivors are left to figure out who they are. It’s about trauma without therapy. And more importantly, it’s about people who’ve spent so long compartmentalizing themselves that they’re no longer sure what’s behind the compartments.

A Dirty Job, Done by Damaged People

The premise is almost suspiciously straightforward. CIA director Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) is about to be impeached. To protect herself, she sends four operatives to a remote facility: Yelena, John Walker (Wyatt Russell), Ava Starr (Hannah John-Kamen), and Taskmaster (Olga Kurylenko). Each is told a different story, and each believes they’re the only one there. The goal? Let them kill each other and burn the evidence.

They don’t. They survive, barely. And in the middle of the kerfuffle, a man shows up basically in his pajamas—Bob (Lewis Pullman), gentle, dazed, and mysterious, dropped into the chaos like a sheep among wolves. He remembers little. And he might be something greater than all of the antiheroes combined.

Bob’s arrival shifts the tone. He’s not a conventional superhuman; there’s no bravado, no power stance. He’s confused and apologetic, like someone who’s walked into a room and forgotten why. Pullman plays him with a gentleness that makes his later transformation even more jarring. There’s something about the way he speaks—hesitant, careful—that suggests he’s trying not to scare even himself.

The film basically adheres to standard-issue Marvel plot mechanics: team-ups, betrayals, action set pieces, a CG-heavy final act with collapsing towers and dark dimensions. But somewhere inside all that, the filmmakers sneak in a movie about mental illness, vulnerability, and the exhausting work of pretending you’re fine. Bob, whose transformation into the unhinged god-figure Sentry (and later his other self, the Void) anchors the second half, speaks of life in “peaks and valleys,” a painful metaphor for a mind that won’t stay still. And when he breaks, it isn’t into villainy. It’s into isolation, into numbness. His scenes land like a punch if you’ve ever been close to someone with a mental illness.

The Anti-Avengers (and Their Sad Little Soccer Team) 

Yelena sees that, maybe too well, even; because she’s been circling the same void herself. Her arc—subtle, unsentimental—is the film’s emotional center. Pugh plays her with restraint, showing us a woman trained to kill who can’t even decide what living looks like. Her reunion with Red Guardian (David Harbour, as delightfully and toe-curlingly awkward as ever) sparks some of the film’s best scenes, a sad-funny rhythm of forced camaraderie and real yearning. He names their group the “Thunderbolts” after Yelena’s elementary school soccer team, which went a whole season without scoring a single goal. It’s funny. Until it’s not.

Sebastian Stan’s Bucky Barnes re-enters here, too—not as a soldier, but a Congressman. That alone feels like a punchline Marvel is barely suppressing, but it leads to some unexpectedly grounded moments. Bucky, too, has become a shepherd of the broken. Watching him try to corral this bunch into doing the right thing, not out of duty but out of mutual pain, gives Stan more to do emotionally than he’s had in years.

Call them misfits, call them Marvel’s answer to “The Suicide Squad“—Valentina calls them “antisocial tragedy in human form.” And yes, the comparison is inevitable, but “Thunderbolts*” is doing something more fragile than its DC counterpart. The humor here doesn’t come from chaos; it comes from sadness. These aren’t big personalities crashing into each other for laughs—they’re broken people trying, and often failing, to connect. And when they’re laughing it’s not because things are funny. They’re laughing probably because they were busy unlearning how to cry.

‘Thunderbolts*’: Too Simple to Be Clever, Too Honest to Be Dismissed 

Of course, as it has been with the latter entries in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, not everything clicks. The pacing stumbles in the middle, leaning too heavily on exposition while the characters tread water. And while Pullman is terrific—trembling, warm, eerie—the Sentry/Void plot leans on comic book logic that can feel a little too neat, especially given how heavy the emotional metaphor is trying to be. It works emotionally, if not narratively.

And yes, it’s simple. If you boiled it down to beats on a whiteboard, it’s not far off from any of the other entries: introduce team, stir chaos, insert larger-than-life threat, cue redemptive moment. But this one’s self-aware about that structure. It doesn’t pretend to reinvent the wheel. What it does do, and well, is pare things down enough to let character breath win out over fan service.

Because what lingers isn’t the plot. It’s a scene where someone admits they miss being told what to do. Or the way Barnes, now a junior Congressman, tries to save people by dragging them into accountability. It’s the way Pugh’s Yelena breaks into a smile at the end—not triumphant, not victorious, just…with a newfound sense of purpose. And instead of being bored, maybe this one’s more than okay.

“There is something wrong with me.”

To quote Yelena’s voiceover in the beginning: yes. I also think there’s something wrong with me. Because for all the justified criticism Marvel has earned in recent years—creative nadir, superhero fatigue, safe plotting, diminishing returns—I left “Thunderbolts*” feeling something I hadn’t felt in a while: not just entertained, but moved. I can’t even remember the last Marvel film that hit me like this. Was it “No Way Home“? “Shang-Chi“? I honestly don’t know. Which tells you everything about how forgettable this franchise has become.

But this one isn’t. “Thunderbolts*” may be modest, weird, and messy all over. But it’s sincere. It’s honest in a way that’s rare for a studio this massive. It doesn’t pretend these characters are heroes. Quite the contrary, it just shows us what it looks like when broken people try, even a little, to fix themselves.

And watching that unfold—not with fanfare, but with discomfort, awkwardness, and the occasional joke that hits a little too close to home—is the kind of Marvel we could get used to again.

 

 

 

 

“Thunderbolts*” will be released in the United States on May 2. Follow us for more coverage.